The invention can be applied for example in the field of home networks.
Typically, a home network allows communication, connection, interoperability between video equipments for personal or recorded video displaying, video games, . . . but mainly it should give to the user the opportunity to communicate easily with the external world.
Video programs, images, music, text pages, information data can be accessed from numerous sources provided by different heterogeneous means of transmission.
For example, television can be broadcasted from satellite, terrestrial, cable, LMDS (Broadcast Network) or delivered by Internet (Broadband Network). That is also true for music or web pages. There is no limit in mixing technologies.
A first approach to connect and adapt the home network to the outside world is to use a residential gateway that has numerous means of reception, a bridge that translates the transport protocol of the incoming data to the protocol supported by the home network.
A solution, commonly proposed, is to provide a box with slots (commonly PCI slots) in which the proper daughter boards are inserted according to the accesses requested by the user.
Such a solution is proposed in the patent application WO 00/11840 filed in the name of Mitsubishi on Aug. 12, 1999 entitled “home gateway”.
This solution presents a lot of drawbacks that are commonly not admitted in consumer products:                In consumer products, opening the box is performed by servicing people only. Allowing consumer to add boards by himself is not admitted.        The basic platform that will receive add-on board(s) has features that will never be used, but they must be paid by the consumer, making the product less competitive for low-end configuration.        More complicated the product is, more expensive it is. Connectors, oversize power supply, large case . . . don't characterize low cost product.        An open system can be tampered more easily, paving the way to the hackers for unauthorized acts.        
Patent applications WO 99/57839 entitled “method and apparatus for user and device command and control in a network” filed on May 7, 1999 and WO 01/13374 entitled “device communication and control in a home network connected to an external network” filed on Aug. 17, 2000, both filed in the name of Samsung, describe a system interconnecting several external sources to a local area network. Each module provides a connection with an external data source. However, such modules do not modify the incoming stream in order to enable the cohabitation of several streams on the local area network and in particular do not adapt the incoming streams data rate to the limited bandwidth of a local area network.